1. Introduction (by Pieraut-Le Bonniec, Gilberte) 2. Speech Bases 3. Phylogeny and Ontogeny of Languages (by Bresson, F.) 4. Prenatal Familiarization (by Lecanuet, J.P.) 5. Initial Equipment for Speech Perception (by Bertoncini, Josiane) 6. Target-Language Influences on Prespeech (by Boysson-Bardies, B. de) 7. Prosodic Cues in Very Young Children s Speech (by Bacri, N.) 8. Basic Discourse Capacities 9. Cohesion: Syntactic Organization Leading to Discourse 10. Verbs as Sentence Organizers (by Pieraut-Le Bonniec, Gilberte) 11. Pronoun Assignment in the Processing of Locally Ambiguous Sentences (by Seguy, J.) 12. Conjunctions: Developmental Issues (by Kail, Michele) 13. Children's Production of Textual Organizers (by Bronckart, J-P.) 14. The Development of Discourse Cohesion: Some Functional and Cross-Linguistic Issues (by Hickmann, Maya) 15. Coherence: Language as it Underlies and Organizes Knowledge 16. An Opaque Text as a Mobilizer of Knowledge (by Dolitsky, Marlene) 17. The Development and Role of Narrative Schema Storytelling (by Esperet, E.) 18. Stories A Psycholinguistic and Ontogenetic Approach to the Acquisition of Narrative Abilities (by Fayol, Michel) 19. The Development of Argumentative Discourse (by Pieraut-Le Bonniec, Gilberte) 20. References 21. Index